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May 25th 2005 KAFKA’S METAMORPHOSIS AT THE THEATRE CHIPPING NORTON GEORGE HUMMER reviews the play. As a thank-you to the Friends of The Theatre Chipping Norton for their loyalty and assistance, the Director and the Council of Management offered a free performance on 25 May. It was a generous gesture in any circumstances, but to give such an outstanding gift was exceptionally generous. The title gives it away: ‘Kafka’s Metamorphosis’, not ‘Metamorphosis’, certainly not ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’. If people in the audience picked up that indicator, they quickly grasped what was being offered on stage. If they didn’t, they stood the chance of being merely ‘blown away’ by the virtuosity and impact of the presentation by Black Moon Theatre Company of New York. What a show! Rene’ Migliaccio formed the company in order to explore a technique that he calls Expressionistic Realism, to provide a ‘stylized, ritualistic expression of reality’. To do this in Kafka’s Metamorphosis he used actors who were also modern dancers live on stage as the three principal characters, while in film extracts shown on a split screen he used additional actors as well as the three principals. The play began with a grotesque awakening of nearly naked Gregor Samsa, pale as a creature released from under a stone, horribly metamorphosed into a giant insect. No one had to explain, it was there in reality in the horrified face of Gregor and his painful exploration of this disastrous alteration to his body. Actual loathing and repugnance, balanced with sympathy for his condition, held the audience locked in concentration; never has a Chippy audience been so still and silent. This opening was pure Kafka. Ovid’s poems described mythical situations in which excesses and extremes of love took their own way, resulting in the pleasure and wonder, and the occasional nasty surprise, of a transformation in the name of love (with lust thrown in for good measure). Kafka began his story with the transformation and worked forward to a conclusion, making his readers reconstruct the circumstances that brought this about and the reason why the result was so disastrous. Eric Pettigrew gave us a Gregor whose transformation was seen in the end to be the final phase of a spiritual strangulation by his family. It ended, as it had to, with his elimination, like a vile beetle. Gregor was the essential breadwinner of the family in order for his father, who was not disposed to work, and nervous mother to remain in their large flat. His sister had been designated the artistic one in the family, and Gregor was expected to support her as well, while she developed her talent as a violinist. No space was allowed for a life for him, even for his identity. In a film sequence we saw and heard the father disposing of what money Gregor had managed to save, while ruing not what had happened to Gregor, but what had happened to the family. Had Gregor ever said to himself, ignored and picked over by his father in the name of the family, ‘Would they show me more consideration if I was a smelly, disgusting beetle?’ Into this Freudian territory the interpretation dipped a metaphorical toe, but no more. The production unfolded at a consistently maintained, stately pace, its highs and lows distinguished by music and light changes as much as by the action on stage. The style of acting was equally stately, an intriguing and effective blend of speechless reality and mime. The pivotal scene was pure ballet as his sister and mother, both masked, fatally came to terms with the hopelessness of Gregor’s affliction. The filmed sequences were equally inventive; the quality of the film was grainy black-and-white, sometimes faded and tinted, shot in expressionistic style and replete with close-ups. But the camera angle was tilted off the vertical or horizontal as if the film was shot urgently. The effect was to make filmed inserts as vital to the action on stage as live action was, and to reinforce the reality of the stylised performances both on stage and in film. It was total vindication of Bertolt Brecht’s teachings regarding alienation, but Migliaccio took the technique further with an impeccable multi-media blend. (An unauthorised, hurried peek at the control desk revealed cue sheets pages and pages in length for the two technicians who operated lights, sound and film, with their hand-written notes and emendations adapting their control panels to this theatre’s resources.) The performance lasted an hour and ten minutes, and in that time it never released its grip. Extraordinary theatre, extraordinarily powerful, impeccably performed and produced. A night of theatre to remember.